by Victor Milán
"It seems unlikely that we face a full-fledged BattleMech attack; for one thing, the ISF would hardly let 'Mech-equipped Blake fanatics loose on Hachiman. We can anticipate something more along the lines of a commando raid. It might be best if you recalled no more than one battalion, to avoid crowding your people. We don't have much spare housing within the Compound."
"I agree. I shall give the orders at once."
Abdulsattah nodded. "I'll speak to our transport office and arrange for the barges. I believe we have the bottoms available to begin operations tonight."
After an exchange of pleasantries the Mirza rang off. Don Carlos squeezed his eyes shut.
It was a mistake. He saw Patsy again, surrounded by Smoke Jaguar OmniMechs, a coyote battling mastiffs. His old BattleMaster had been slow, too slow...
The door to his office opened. Marisol Cabrera entered, trim in her Marik-style uniform, her dark auburn hair, lightly dusted with gray, tied up on her head in a traditional Galistean knot. She carried a plastic tray, on which sat a white teapot of heavy Galisteo ceramic with two matching cups. All were painted in blue with scenes of great-horned Ranger bulls doing battle with vaqueros in AgroMechs. The set had been fashioned by craftsmen on Don Carlos' own hacienda of Vado Ancho, and had accompanied him and the Regiment on their many adventures throughout the Inner Sphere.
She set the tray down before him. He smiled at the minty smell of the steam.
"Yerba Buena," she said. "It will help you relax."
"You know just what I need, Marisol," he said. "What would I do without you?"
"Let me rub your neck," she said, moving around behind Don Carlos so that he would not see her smile of pleasure at his words. He nodded, then groaned in satisfaction as her small, strong fingers began to knead at the knots of tension in his neck and shoulders.
He closed his eyes, and this time his daughter's martyrdom did not rise up behind the lids. "I am getting too old for this," he said dreamily. "I should retire to Vado Ancho. My sister Marta grows old beyond her years with the strain of managing the place, but it would be a blissful rest for me."
And I'd be willing to take my chances that Thomas Marik no longer remembers which side a long-ago commander of the Free Worlds Legionnaires took in the succession dispute. And that we'll be permitted at least some of our ancient freedoms until I'm safely resting with Patsy and the Queen of Heaven. He crossed himself.
"What are you waiting for, Carlos?" she asked in his ear. "Why not give it over now? Surely you've fought as long as any man must. Not even Saint James the Moor-slayer did more."
And hand the Seventeenth over to Gavilan. He almost shuddered. There were certain young bravos, particularly in his First Battalion, who would like that. But the older hands—and wiser heads—might not be as ready to accept the younger Camacho's leadership until he had shown that he could truly bear the burdens of command.
Don Carlos sighed. My son, my son, what have I done to you? He knew the answer all too well.
"I cannot," he said. "At least, not now. Have you heard the news?"
"There was something about a scientific discovery here at this very place," she said.
"It was a lie. A lie meant to cause trouble—to cover trouble. We are due to be attacked here soon. I have a duty to our employer, and to my people. Surely, I cannot rest until the danger is past and I have fulfilled my commission to Chandrasekhar Kurita."
It was Cabrera's turn to sigh, though she did so inaudibly. "You'll want to recall a battalion from the bivouac outside town."
He nodded. "The First, I think."
"¿Por qué? They've had their turn here already. Third Battalion has yet to serve its rotation in the Compound."
"Third is the greenest. First is our best Battalion."
"You must be so very proud of your boy, for what he's made of them."
Or what they've made themselves, in spite of him. Still, it would be good seasoning for the lad. "Yes," Don Carlos said.
"I shall see to all the arrangements," Cabrera told him, resting both hands briefly on his shoulders.
He reached up to pat her hand. "Dear Marisol. Ever the perfect executive officer. You are a treasure."
Again she was glad that he could not see her face, could not see the pleasure in her dark eyes, nor the pain.
23
Masamori, Hachiman
Galedon District, Draconis Combine
15 October 3056
Between 2330 and midnight, workers arriving for the graveyard shift thronged the Tubeway station beneath the center of the Hachiman Taro Compound. Those workers jammed into the first two cars of the East Rain train, which served the lower Middle Class and upper Laborer districts of Shin Kobe, Hangan, and Kim, north of the Compound, were aware of the presence of some two dozen gaijin in the pastel jumpsuits of the late-shift HTE employees. Politely, they refrained from questioning them, or even staring too openly. Foreigners or not, these people had evidently been accepted into Uncle Chandy's uchi. They were not altogether tanin.
Some of them carried gym bags with sporting-good company logos printed on them—several, in fact, from outside the Combine. This was not remarkable. Uncle Chandy encouraged fitness among his employees, and set aside a one-hour workout break for those who desired to run, perform calisthenics, or practice kendo. The foreign logos, having begun to appear openly in Combine markets only recently with Theodore's reforms, were already past their prime as status symbols in Masamori.
The foreigners did not join quite so enthusiastically as the Masakko in the rush for the exits when the train pulled into the HTE stop. They let the first quiet crush flow past them and out the doors toward the exit turnstiles, where the workers obediently queued to present their holobadge IDs to a pair of guards in sky-blue jumpsuits and helmets with a distinctive white stripe painted around them.
The first of the foreigners was a head taller than most of the Masakko. He wore a dark goatee and a Fab Three decal on his hardhat, indicating he worked on building controller boards for household appliances in the northern part of the Compound. His lemon yellow jumpsuit fit his lean frame loosely.
The guards glanced at the ID he held up, nodded. As he started through the turnstile, a metal detector began to shrill alarm.
From inside his baggy jumpsuit, the goateed man produced a compact semiautomatic pistol with built-in sound suppresses Before either guard could react, he had shot both between the eyes.
From a news kiosk inside the concourse a voice shouted a phrase he did not understand as the whole situation went abruptly and totally to hell.
The words meant "Get down!" in Japanese. Unruly though they could be, the residents of Hachiman were amazingly docile and obedient by the standards of most of human space. When the voice of command told them to get down, they dropped unquestioningly onto their bellies—leaving two dozen gaijin Word of Blake terrorists standing with their teeth in their mouths.
From kiosks, from behind square structural columns, from maintenance closets, yellow muzzle-flashes flared. The tall man with the goatee had time to shout a defiant slogan in praise of Blake, trigger the preprogrammed emergency broadcast from the communicator he held in his left hand, and raise his silenced pistol. Then a score of bloody flowers bloomed on his chest, driving him back half a dozen steps even before he could fall.
The two dozen Aztechs stationed in hiding in the Tube way station were not MechWarriors. But they were warriors just the same, and none had served the Regiment with spanner and torch alone. Many had been blooded before ever leaving the homeworlds.
Most of the terrorist commandos were cut down as they were still grabbing for weapons concealed in their clothing or their gym bags. Four of them managed to break past the barriers, hurling grenades and firing full-auto. They reached the stairs that led to the surface, started up.
Her face bleeding from half a dozen grenade fragments, Staff Sergeant Belle, the diminutive Acoma woman in charge of the ambush, pressed a contact on the small black unit she held in her
hand. It made a distinctive clacking sound.
The pair of Claymore mines had been placed so that they would fire their hail of steel marbles at an upward angle, over the heads of the obediently prone Laborers, and straight into the Word of Blake raiders, blasting them to shreds from the stairwell.
* * *
Sergeant Belle had not forgotten her first duty in the hot rush of action. She had hit her own panic button before opening fire herself.
Alarm klaxons had scarcely begun their rising-falling whine aboveground when a huge white flash came from the north wall of the Compound. The noise of an explosion rolled like a wave across the great enclosure.
With whining servos and the thud of great metal feet, the BattleMechs of the Seventeenth began to move. Don Carlos had been keeping a whole company at a time in their machines for four-hour shifts. With six companies within the Compound's walls nobody got a day off, but the Colonel believed that his Mech Warriors were at their sharpest when they weren't in the cockpit for too long at a stretch, and twenty hours out of twenty-four was plenty of stand-down time.
Bronco was the hot company tonight—and suspecting that the terrorists might try to take advantage of shift change, Colonel Camacho had his watches staggered so they did not coincide with those of the Compound workers. The other companies, in stages of alertness ranging from ready-room to pulling rack time, began to race for their machines.
Cassie nodded to Zuma and Diana, bulky in their armor vests, who were overseeing noncombatants and dependents—mostly children under twelve, who were already streaming into underground air-raid bunkers. Whether Uncle Chandy had prepared for the inevitable time when the Clan truce ended, or whether he simply believed in preparing for any contingency, the Compound had been well-prepared to endure a siege before the Seventeenth ever got there.
She kicked her little Honda-Rheinmetall motorcycle into life and snarled off in the direction of the blast. A believer in stealth as the foremost virtue—over even mobility—she usually disdained any transport with a mill in it. But with sirens going off everywhere, vehicles racing in all directions, and BattleMechs rumbling into action, the noise of the bike's engine would make no damned difference. And not even Cassie's powerful legs could drive her MiG mountain bike across the vast Compound as quickly.
She snarled past the 'Mech assembly buildings, great, brightly lit caverns that seemed almost portals to other worlds. In front of her, a giant shadow strode purposefully forward. She felt a reflex twinge of panic at the sight of the all-too-familiar silhouette of an Atlas.
She felt a second twinge, then, because there was only one Atlas hot at this time of night. Don't pull a Patsy on me, Lady K. These aren't tigre Omnis we're facing, but that doesn't mean they can't hurt you in your hundred-ton cocoon.
Somehow she doubted her new friend was one to take anything for granted, which reassured her. The metal monster raised its right hand in greeting as Cassie swerved to pass it.
* * *
On the three-sixty display above her transpex viewscreen Captain Kali MacDougall saw the figure of a Wasp rising past the pagodalike Citadel, visible as a moving blot of blackness against starshot black, above the yellow light-dome cast by the Compound floods.
"Sabado," she said into the mike that curved in front of her mouth from her neurohelmet, "get your butt back down on the ground. Don't make yourself a target until we know what we're up against."
A double flare of jump jets as the jock clutched the gyros to tilt his machine back and brake his forward progress. "Affirmative, Lady K," came back into her ears. "Lo siento."
"Winger," Kali said, calling one of the two pilots patrolling the north wall. "You read me, Winger? Tecolote?"
"Teco here, Captain," came back the voice of Lieutenant JG Hector "Teco" Alvarez, piloting the Regiment's sole JagerMech. "There's a great big puto of a hole in the wall up here. Lots of small-arms fire coming in at the Blues holding out in the North Unit Fab buildings. I saw Winger's Jenner take a rocket right to the cockpit. His systems are all shut down."
"He punch out?"
"Negative, Lady K. ¡Ai, cabrón! A whole boatload of rockets just missed me!"
"Well, use the buildings for cover and shoot back." Run-ins with Clan Elementals, and, ironically, having the obsessive and highly successful 'Mech-slayer Cassie Suthorn in the unit, had gone a long way toward eroding the Caballeros' smug MechWarriors prejudice that the only true threat to a BattleMech was another BattleMech. Lady K's people were nervous about facing infantry armed with anti-'Mech weapons and fanatical enough to use them—especially once they got in among the hardened buildings of the Compound. Restricted mobility and daggers-drawn engagement range made a built-up area like that perfect for just the kind of nasty ambush their own Abtakha so loved to spring.
"The cavalry's on the way," Kali assured Teco. And then she had time to think, Sierra Foxtrot, this fandango's just begun and I've already lost a man. A hell of a start to her career as a company commander.
There were voices in the back of her head, familiar voices, telling her she was bad and stupid and would fail. She set her jaw. She had long since learned to recognize those voices: they were the enemy. The hostile figures stealing through the night with their man-portable SRMs were nothing more than potentially lethal nuisances.
One good thing about being strapped into a BattleMech cockpit in the midst of a firefight, she thought. Makes it darned hard to break your sobriety. She'd talk to Zuma after this one was in the books. If they both made it through.
Right now she had to buckle down to the business of pulling her command through. She recited a prayer to herself and punched up the command net. "Bronco Company, we have a major breach in the north wall, heavy fire incoming, small-arms and anti-armor ..."
* * *
It took Cassie less than ten seconds to decide the north wall attack was a feint.
It didn't look like a feint when she'd come skidding broadside out of the mouth of a Compound street near the river to look west along the avenue running inside the perimeter. The Blues, as the Caballeros called HTE's own security troops, were indeed trading an impressive volume of fire with a force trying to push through a breach fifteen meters across.
Awful big blast, she thought. Van bomb, I'll just bet. Fertilizer and fuel oil. She could see bodies sprawled in the opening, and on the far side a Jenner showing no sign of damage but also no signs of life. Just then she saw Teco's JagerMech step out of a street west of the breach and hose down the hole with the big autocannons in either arm.
The Word of Blake terrorists were as fanatical as advertised, answering the Jag's barrage with an immediate swarm of SRMs that blew big chunks out of the cement-bunkered Fab buildings of North Unit. Cassie saw a couple of rockets flash off against the 'Mech's barrel belly before it ducked back.
They were burning man-portable missiles as if they were free and that was what clued her. Unarmored infantry could never hope to batter its way into a fortified compound against resistance from BattleMechs supported by ground troops, no matter how many SRMs they were willing to light off. What they could do was cause some hurt and make a whole lot of noise.
"Tiburón," she said into the mike in the commo headset she'd crammed on before peeling out. "Tiburón, this is Abtakha. Come in, Tiburón."
"He isn't on the net yet," came the dry, supercilious voice of Gordo Baird. "This is Colonel Baird. You can give your information to me."
"Is there anybody else on the command net?"
"Now, just a minute, young lady—"
"Lady K reading you, Abtakha, GA."
Imagine being glad to hear the voice of a 'Mech pilot. "I'm at the breach, Lady K. You around here?"
"Getting there. Dark Lady's a big-legged bitch and slow, but she's pure mean. Some of the other Broncos ought to be up with you, though."
"Lady K and any 'lleros listening: I think this is a fake. I say again, the attack up here's a diversion."
That brought a babble of excited comment, mostly f
rom the Bronco 'Mech pilots who had come up to support Teco and the Blues. "That's ridiculous," Baird said, overriding the babble. "From all reports, this is a major raid."
"They're busting lots of caps, Gordo. That doesn't mean this is where they're taking their big shot."
"Abtakha, this is Badlands. We had a bunch try to come in through the Tubeway station. Zuma's people dry-gulched them, no survivors."
"See?" Baird said with hornet triumph. "This is a two pronged attack. HTE security has already talked to a prisoner from the breach; the two attacks are all there are."
Cassie wheeled her bike and gunned it south, toward the dark approaching bulk of Kali's Atlas.
"That's all your bird knows about," she said, bent low over the bars. She streaked past the Atlas. "Badlands, I'm headed for the south wall. I want you to send Scout Platoon that way; they'll get there before me."
"Lieutenant Junior Grade Suthorn, this is desertion in the face of an enemy! Captain Powell, you are to hold your platoon in reserve until—"
"Cram it, Gordo," Badlands Powell snarled. "You're not in my chain of command. And try to remember to use callsigns like a real soldier. Abtakha, I will comply. Badlands out."
"Nothing up here Bronco can't hold," Lady K added. "And if the real action's down south, it'll all be over but the shouting by the time I leadfoot it down there, anyhow."
* * *
Colonel Carlos Camacho sat in the cockpit of Great White, his captured Clan 'Mech, and dreamed. Queries and situation reports crackled in his neurohelmet. They went unheeded; he was in a different time, a different place ...
The Drac mining world of Jeronimo, facing the inexorable advance of the fearful tigres, Clan Smoke Jaguar. The Seventeenth and their DCMS allies were falling back again, trying to gain enough space and time for DropShips to evacuate the battered units. Only the brutal terrain of the Contra-Pelagian Mountains into whose heart the Inner Sphere survivors were retreating kept the faster Clan Omnis from overrunning them—the terrain and the equally brutal ambushing tactics of the Caballeros.
